Lursa and B'Etor were the closest I can think of. But they were more rogues than a "real" threat.
The problem with L&B is that they tended to come off a bit goofy, that plus most of their schemes tended to too ineffectual or low profile or even bumbling. They never got a moment, plot wise or performance wise, where they could step up and be fully, unironically badass.
Martok was the only TNG-era Klingon I can remember off the top of my head that had the gravitas to be a great villain, had he been a villain. But of course, he wasn't.
Gowron kinda grew on me as a foreign leader character who actually made the Empire seem like a real entity with it's own priorities, rather than just something there to provide token opposition or conciliation to the Fed's "protagonist" nation. I don't think he would've made a great villain, but he did make the Empire feel more real.
The makeup, in particular the teeth, didn't do them any favors either. The TNG/DS9 makeup FX people were never very good at making teeth that actually fit in the actor's mouths properly, and the resulting lip distention was kinda the big red nose on their clownishness. I'm not convinced they (with the exception of Martok) could've pulled off a proper badass moment even if the script had been on their side, just because they'd have to overcome the hilarity of their appearance. That, and the bad perm hair that all TNG (and ENT) Klingons had.
Then for Klingons the Inverse. A Klingon Captain that acts more like a Diplomat. And I try not to pigeon hole everyone as klingon, let alone supportive of the empire, but... like most Federation Captains would be aiming to get all the answers and solve through words... let's be honest... the warriors way tends to be more blunt. It's the outliers that ask questions first.
Cryptic doesn't do such a good job in this department. And yeah, my Nausicaan is...at least by Klingon and Nausicaan standards...a cooler head, and a little less likely to go into a situation he hasn't thoroughly staked out first.
I once got an angry letter for a having a captain use the word "Alright" as opposed to proper "All Right."
"Alright" isn't a real word, though commonly seen. The proper spelling is indeed "all right." Still not something someone should've been flaming you over, though.
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But that's informed by other aspects of my approaches. I tend to be a very big believer in "show, don't tell", so I rarely do dialogs that are more than three boxes deep. I tend to feel that if I have to do more, that means something's wrong in the dialog's context or the overall structure of the mission. I'd rather create an extra map of player business to explain stuff than do so through text dumps. I feel this actually creates both a better story and a better gameplay experience.
I don't mind missions with a lot of talking...I find that to be an immersive experience, to be honest. But I realize some people don't.
I mean, an NPC that flirts with you and you have the options to reciprocate or not: that's awesome. But doing that while having here make wraparound comments where she claims you have reciprocated/will reciprocate regardless of what you actually choose invalidates that.
The one case where that would work is if the NPC is supposed to be a total and complete creep who doesn't understand the meaning of "no."
In regards to boff/doff discipline, I kinda think a lack thereof is a sign of immature writing. There's a trope I'll see from time to time with webcomics, where the protagonist will have a workplace setting that should be very high-discipline, but is instead even less so than middle school.
I also think that some people just don't have a clue how the military works. Heck...sometimes I even got the feeling the writers of Star Trek itself didn't get how the military works. I saw stuff on that show on a routine basis that you couldn't even get away with in the Air Force (the most "relaxed" of the services and the one that I think Starfleet is really based on, despite all of its Navy trappings).
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"Alright" isn't a real word, though commonly seen. The proper spelling is indeed "all right." Still not something someone should've been flaming you over, though.
It's kind of ambiguous at this point. Alright was originally an incorrect version of "all right", but it is used so commonly at this point that it is no longer necessarily the case.
My feelings as well. We allegedly know more about their culture in the later incarnations, but the earlier ones were more subtle as characters. The later ones tended to use the cultural fluff like a cartoonish stereotype to avoid actually writing people. And even that cultural stuff is pretty shallow and ham-handed. We may not have been explicitly privy to their culture with the earlier Klingons, but the implied culture (via the characters it produced) seemed more nuanced/rounded than what we actually got later.
You would like the novel The Final Reflection a lot, if you haven't read it already...
In fact, the mustache-twirlers actually highlight this. There were a couple good, well done Klinks in the later era, but they were all good or neutral (relative to the Federation). Though the producers tried several times, the klinks haven't had a "magnificent TRIBBLE" since Chang.
They also haven't really had a lot of brains since Chang. That was the striking thing about Star Trek VI: regardless of the cracks the Enterprise crew made about Klingon table manners, bad breath, etc., you really had the sense of having just been in a room of intelligent people with Gorkon, Azetbur, and Chang. That hasn't been seen since among Klingons. Q even picked up on that when he nicknamed Worf "Microbrain."
I agree and disagree about the whole "show not tell" topic. I agree that for the most part the mission storyline should be progressed by actions of the player. However, I think that having the ability to talk to NPCs about the background of what is happening, what their thoughts are, even unrelated events, results in a much more vivid setting, and NPCs that feel more like people rather than a 3d model standing there to bark out a few lines.
It's all the optional/nonessential stuff that creates a deeper world, but for the most part you should be able to skip that if you want.
I feel the same way. If it increases mission length significantly, so be it...I don't mind.
Also, DaiMon Tat always refers to the player as Hu-man, but I put in an option for the player to point out they're not Human, to which she responds she doesn't care because everyone in Starfleet is either a Hu-man or a Hu-man boot licker, and all of the puny lobed species look the same to her anyway. Sorry, I won't do that with most characters, but I had to have at least one Ferengi who used the term Hu-man.
That is AWESOME. Very well executed joke. Even my Cardassian captain would get the intended effect out of it, because it would indeed take some serious and deliberate disregard to mistake him for human.
I rather like that. It kinda echoes the comment Gorkon's daughter made about Starfleet being a "humans' club" (or something to that effect) during the dinner scene in ST-VI. Always thought that bit was clever on account of all the human-centric naming conventions and things in the shows.
Exactly. I try to have a better mix of species around in my stories, be they fanfics or my missions.
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I also think that some people just don't have a clue how the military works. Heck...sometimes I even got the feeling the writers of Star Trek itself didn't get how the military works. I saw stuff on that show on a routine basis that you couldn't even get away with in the Air Force (the most "relaxed" of the services and the one that I think Starfleet is really based on, despite all of its Navy trappings).
I think that you have to treat Starfleet as being a little different than a real life military. It has a mixed mission which is not just defense, but also exploration and scientific discovery, so I view it as being as sort of a hybrid between a modern day military and a civilian organization. Except maybe in DS9, the focus of the show is actually only rarely on military matters.
I tend to think of it as a cross between the military and a UN peacekeeping force. Not exactly a well-defined mission.
In my fanfic this leads to disastrous results for ground troops in the Dominion War. Starfleet's inadequacy when it comes to maintaining and properly equipping an infantry force is horrifying.
(That's why I actually do not object to the weapons, shields, or armor in STO. It's what should've been there in the first place.)
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
I don't mind missions with a lot of talking...I find that to be an immersive experience, to be honest. But I realize some people don't.
Well, I'm actually approaching it from a media theory perspective rather than an immersion one. It's true that long conversations and text exposition can be immersive by way of realism or detail, they're kind of squandering the media's strengths.
I'm an ex-film student, so that's where I'm coming from: film is a visual media, so if you're using primarily literary communication techniques like verbal/text exposition instead of visual ones, you're kind of corralling yourself in a "worst of both worlds" situation. You can't replicate the unique strengths of a literary format, and you're not capitalizing on the unique strengths of the visual format.
The same is true of video games, except the unique strengths in that case are interactivity rather than visual. Video games are kind of in a unique position, in that interactivity can actually allow a single media to fully capitalize on the strengths of either the literary or visual fields. That's pretty damn cool in itself IMO (and unfortunately VERY underexploited, but then it is still a young medium), but still not it's primary strength, which is the interactivity itself. If a film is "show don't tell", then a video game is "do, don't tell".
A game where information is conveyed through an active play element is making fuller use of the media's potential than one that uses a passive element like a text block or a cutscene. That doesn't mean text blocks or cutscenes actively detract from the game on principle, it's just that, well, it's an inherently unambitious way of approaching things.
Since interactivity is really the key thing, not text, a text-based branching diolog game/minigame would be exploiting that element. Exposition blocks are not though, since they are passive. STO's engine is also limited in that text trees cannot effect the overall mission, since the system can't remember choices outside of an individual tree. This means that unless your entire mission takes place on one map, dialog trees can only be throwaway textural gameplay, not actual plot-essential gameplay.
And that ties into one of the other principles I tend to believe in: "less is more". That one is admittedly more of an aesthetic opinion. But combined with "do/show, not tell" it means I tend to favor either cutting info that isn't plot essential or folding it into the same bandwidth as the plot relevant stuff via implication or some other clever means.
TL/DR: If immersion was my only standard of measure, I'd agree with you, but I'm actually trying to satisfy immersion + multiple other standards at the same time, so that requires a different sort of juggling act.
The one case where that would work is if the NPC is supposed to be a total and complete creep who doesn't understand the meaning of "no."
Absolutely true. In this case though, it was a temporal agent who you were meeting in a sort of River Song-ish out of sequence fashion, and she kept making references to you (the PC) and her being lovers in her past but your future... regardless of whether you indulged or rebuffed her advances.
In my fanfic this leads to disastrous results for ground troops in the Dominion War. Starfleet's inadequacy when it comes to maintaining and properly equipping an infantry force is horrifying.
I like this. It actually fits in really well with a lot of stuff in the shows: the lack of combat uniforms/gear, the unergonomic weapons, poor unit tactics, etc.
Currently working on a mission where the final encounter ends in a very long, choice-heavy dialog.
CHOICES YAY! Of course, it requires clever writing to get around the limitations of gameplay and create more of the illusion of player empowerment than the reality -- but I find that an engaging writing challenge.
Of course, one of the choices is 'enough talk, BLOW SHIP UP!', but hey! More power to you.
(IMO, at least Federation side, a lot more missions should be solvable by diplomacy to be canon... but also let you just wade in guns a-blazin if you want.)
Campaign: The Fenwick Cycle NWS-DKR9GB7KH
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
They also haven't really had a lot of brains since Chang. That was the striking thing about Star Trek VI: regardless of the cracks the Enterprise crew made about Klingon table manners, bad breath, etc., you really had the sense of having just been in a room of intelligent people with Gorkon, Azetbur, and Chang. That hasn't been seen since among Klingons. Q even picked up on that when he nicknamed Worf "Microbrain."
Yeah, Gorkon, et al. did a very good job of coming across as people. Admittedly, Chang was a very devious and evil person, but he was a person none the less.
As for the poorly equipped troops.... I see that as a limitation of being a TV show. IRL I'd expect it, but in a tv show that takes a lot of budget...
I like this. It actually fits in really well with a lot of stuff in the shows: the lack of combat uniforms/gear, the unergonomic weapons, poor unit tactics, etc.
The other key, to me, is O'Brien's past. We know he was Starfleet's equivalent of infantry in the past, but we do not see those skills drawn on most of the time, only his technical ones. It's almost as if Starfleet does not even maintain infantry units, but draws personnel ad hoc off of its starships. One would expect O'Brien to be in charge of some sort of security or tactical unit given that he has a better idea what to DO than almost anybody else on the Enterprise or (in earlier seasons) on DS9, and that would include Worf. Yet he isn't. True, that could be due to burnout with combat, but you'd expect to see him at least consulted as an expert.
That right there is another key indicator of pre-STO Starfleet's lack of preparedness.
Yeah, Gorkon, et al. did a very good job of coming across as people. Admittedly, Chang was a very devious and evil person, but he was a person none the less.
If you search "Klingon Academy Intro" on YouTube, you get to see Chang outside of STVI, and it's really interesting to see how he compares to "newer" Klingons. There's even an explanation of sorts in game of the difference.
As for the poorly equipped troops.... I see that as a limitation of being a TV show. IRL I'd expect it, but in a tv show that takes a lot of budget...
I'm not so sure. Even looking at the Cardassians you get a better sense of battle preparedness than looking at Starfleet troops. The Cardassians actually look to be trying given that they have armor of some sort. But the fact that we never saw cover shields, even an attempt at helmets or armor (which would at least guard against shrapnel injuries if not a phaser blast, back then)...I don't think it would've been that hard to do on a budget.
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One thing about huge text and choices that can make it easy though, is right from the Bioware book of the original Kotor.
Write dialogs in response that you can use for multiple choices. Sure, some captain choices are rude show stoppers, others... are fluff. Captain can go from A to B and pick anything he wants, he still goes A to B. It takes creative writing from time to time, but, again it is a thing I find entertaining.
Comments
The problem with L&B is that they tended to come off a bit goofy, that plus most of their schemes tended to too ineffectual or low profile or even bumbling. They never got a moment, plot wise or performance wise, where they could step up and be fully, unironically badass.
Martok was the only TNG-era Klingon I can remember off the top of my head that had the gravitas to be a great villain, had he been a villain. But of course, he wasn't.
Gowron kinda grew on me as a foreign leader character who actually made the Empire seem like a real entity with it's own priorities, rather than just something there to provide token opposition or conciliation to the Fed's "protagonist" nation. I don't think he would've made a great villain, but he did make the Empire feel more real.
The makeup, in particular the teeth, didn't do them any favors either. The TNG/DS9 makeup FX people were never very good at making teeth that actually fit in the actor's mouths properly, and the resulting lip distention was kinda the big red nose on their clownishness. I'm not convinced they (with the exception of Martok) could've pulled off a proper badass moment even if the script had been on their side, just because they'd have to overcome the hilarity of their appearance. That, and the bad perm hair that all TNG (and ENT) Klingons had.
Cryptic doesn't do such a good job in this department. And yeah, my Nausicaan is...at least by Klingon and Nausicaan standards...a cooler head, and a little less likely to go into a situation he hasn't thoroughly staked out first.
"Alright" isn't a real word, though commonly seen.
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I don't mind missions with a lot of talking...I find that to be an immersive experience, to be honest. But I realize some people don't.
The one case where that would work is if the NPC is supposed to be a total and complete creep who doesn't understand the meaning of "no."
I also think that some people just don't have a clue how the military works. Heck...sometimes I even got the feeling the writers of Star Trek itself didn't get how the military works. I saw stuff on that show on a routine basis that you couldn't even get away with in the Air Force (the most "relaxed" of the services and the one that I think Starfleet is really based on, despite all of its Navy trappings).
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It's kind of ambiguous at this point. Alright was originally an incorrect version of "all right", but it is used so commonly at this point that it is no longer necessarily the case.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/alright?s=t
I think it's safe to assume by the 24th century it will be one for certain.
Click here for my Foundry tutorial on Creating A Custom Interior Map.
You would like the novel The Final Reflection a lot, if you haven't read it already...
They also haven't really had a lot of brains since Chang. That was the striking thing about Star Trek VI: regardless of the cracks the Enterprise crew made about Klingon table manners, bad breath, etc., you really had the sense of having just been in a room of intelligent people with Gorkon, Azetbur, and Chang. That hasn't been seen since among Klingons. Q even picked up on that when he nicknamed Worf "Microbrain."
I feel the same way. If it increases mission length significantly, so be it...I don't mind.
That is AWESOME. Very well executed joke. Even my Cardassian captain would get the intended effect out of it, because it would indeed take some serious and deliberate disregard to mistake him for human.
Exactly. I try to have a better mix of species around in my stories, be they fanfics or my missions.
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I think that you have to treat Starfleet as being a little different than a real life military. It has a mixed mission which is not just defense, but also exploration and scientific discovery, so I view it as being as sort of a hybrid between a modern day military and a civilian organization. Except maybe in DS9, the focus of the show is actually only rarely on military matters.
Click here for my Foundry tutorial on Creating A Custom Interior Map.
In my fanfic this leads to disastrous results for ground troops in the Dominion War. Starfleet's inadequacy when it comes to maintaining and properly equipping an infantry force is horrifying.
(That's why I actually do not object to the weapons, shields, or armor in STO. It's what should've been there in the first place.)
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-)
Proudly F2P. Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Well, I'm actually approaching it from a media theory perspective rather than an immersion one. It's true that long conversations and text exposition can be immersive by way of realism or detail, they're kind of squandering the media's strengths.
I'm an ex-film student, so that's where I'm coming from: film is a visual media, so if you're using primarily literary communication techniques like verbal/text exposition instead of visual ones, you're kind of corralling yourself in a "worst of both worlds" situation. You can't replicate the unique strengths of a literary format, and you're not capitalizing on the unique strengths of the visual format.
The same is true of video games, except the unique strengths in that case are interactivity rather than visual. Video games are kind of in a unique position, in that interactivity can actually allow a single media to fully capitalize on the strengths of either the literary or visual fields. That's pretty damn cool in itself IMO (and unfortunately VERY underexploited, but then it is still a young medium), but still not it's primary strength, which is the interactivity itself. If a film is "show don't tell", then a video game is "do, don't tell".
A game where information is conveyed through an active play element is making fuller use of the media's potential than one that uses a passive element like a text block or a cutscene. That doesn't mean text blocks or cutscenes actively detract from the game on principle, it's just that, well, it's an inherently unambitious way of approaching things.
Since interactivity is really the key thing, not text, a text-based branching diolog game/minigame would be exploiting that element. Exposition blocks are not though, since they are passive. STO's engine is also limited in that text trees cannot effect the overall mission, since the system can't remember choices outside of an individual tree. This means that unless your entire mission takes place on one map, dialog trees can only be throwaway textural gameplay, not actual plot-essential gameplay.
And that ties into one of the other principles I tend to believe in: "less is more". That one is admittedly more of an aesthetic opinion. But combined with "do/show, not tell" it means I tend to favor either cutting info that isn't plot essential or folding it into the same bandwidth as the plot relevant stuff via implication or some other clever means.
TL/DR: If immersion was my only standard of measure, I'd agree with you, but I'm actually trying to satisfy immersion + multiple other standards at the same time, so that requires a different sort of juggling act.
Absolutely true. In this case though, it was a temporal agent who you were meeting in a sort of River Song-ish out of sequence fashion, and she kept making references to you (the PC) and her being lovers in her past but your future... regardless of whether you indulged or rebuffed her advances.
I like this. It actually fits in really well with a lot of stuff in the shows: the lack of combat uniforms/gear, the unergonomic weapons, poor unit tactics, etc.
CHOICES YAY! Of course, it requires clever writing to get around the limitations of gameplay and create more of the illusion of player empowerment than the reality -- but I find that an engaging writing challenge.
Of course, one of the choices is 'enough talk, BLOW SHIP UP!', but hey! More power to you.
(IMO, at least Federation side, a lot more missions should be solvable by diplomacy to be canon... but also let you just wade in guns a-blazin if you want.)
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
As for the poorly equipped troops.... I see that as a limitation of being a TV show. IRL I'd expect it, but in a tv show that takes a lot of budget...
My character Tsin'xing
The other key, to me, is O'Brien's past. We know he was Starfleet's equivalent of infantry in the past, but we do not see those skills drawn on most of the time, only his technical ones. It's almost as if Starfleet does not even maintain infantry units, but draws personnel ad hoc off of its starships. One would expect O'Brien to be in charge of some sort of security or tactical unit given that he has a better idea what to DO than almost anybody else on the Enterprise or (in earlier seasons) on DS9, and that would include Worf. Yet he isn't. True, that could be due to burnout with combat, but you'd expect to see him at least consulted as an expert.
That right there is another key indicator of pre-STO Starfleet's lack of preparedness.
If you search "Klingon Academy Intro" on YouTube, you get to see Chang outside of STVI, and it's really interesting to see how he compares to "newer" Klingons. There's even an explanation of sorts in game of the difference.
I'm not so sure. Even looking at the Cardassians you get a better sense of battle preparedness than looking at Starfleet troops. The Cardassians actually look to be trying given that they have armor of some sort. But the fact that we never saw cover shields, even an attempt at helmets or armor (which would at least guard against shrapnel injuries if not a phaser blast, back then)...I don't think it would've been that hard to do on a budget.
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Write dialogs in response that you can use for multiple choices. Sure, some captain choices are rude show stoppers, others... are fluff. Captain can go from A to B and pick anything he wants, he still goes A to B. It takes creative writing from time to time, but, again it is a thing I find entertaining.